


Comes when called

by dafna



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8888542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dafna/pseuds/dafna
Summary: Three tech conferences, two Pied Piper execs, one tracking device. Set in the weeks after the Pied Piper launch in S3, but no real spoilers.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [youjik33](https://archiveofourown.org/users/youjik33/gifts).



“Wait, why aren’t we hiring booth babes for CES?” Dinesh asked.

Richard sighed, rubbing his forehead with his hand. Erlich, passing through to get another yogurt, heard the words “babes” and paused to find out what was going on.

“We can’t afford booth babes,” Richard said.

Jared made that face that let you know he was very disappointed in you, and life in general. Erlich was pretty sure that it was his secret weapon to make Richard do whatever he wanted.

“Also,” Jared said, “the use of booth babes at technology shows is the kind of retrograde thinking that has made it difficult for our industry to diversify to meet the needs of a complex marketplace.”

“Right,” Richard said. “That.”

“Plus, it means your tech fucking sucks.” Guilfoyle turned around from his computer and joined the conversation for the first time.

Dinesh sighed, wistful, but nodded. “That is true. All anyone remembers from that Hooli 360 launch is those hot chicks they got to hand out the swag. I don’t even remember what Hooli 360 did, do you?”

They all paused to think. Jared, who Erlich had seen wearing a Hooli 360 launch team t-shirt, said he thought it might have had something to do with the cloud.

“OK, right, so that’s settled,” Richard said. “Dinesh will take one of the newbies and man our CES booth.”

“Wait, hang on,” Dinesh said.

“I’ll do it,” Guilfoyle said.

“Oh, would you?” Jared said, looking gratefully at Guilfoyle. “That would be incredibly helpful because -"

“Wait, hang on,” Dinesh said again.

“Pakistani Denzel over there would be fine for some multimarketing seminar in a Holiday Inn,” Guilfoyle said, “but talking up Pied Piper at CES obviously requires someone who can explain our code, not just make it worse with his shitty algorithms. I’m happy to sacrifice my time for the greater good of my –“

“OK, fine,” Dinesh said. “I’ll do it, too.”

Jared beamed and clapped his hands together. “Gentlemen, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful –“

“Shut up, Jared,” Dinesh and Guilfoyle said in unison.

Erlich realized on the first day of the conference that none of them had thought this through. No booth babes plus Jared’s kumbaya shit meant the CEO of Pied Piper was stuck in one half of their pimped-out hotel suite giving all the tech demos because the guys who should have been giving them were too busy sucking dicks out on the show floor.

Meanwhile, in the other half of the suite, Erlich was trying to convince some cocksucker from _The Wall Street Journal_ that he didn’t need to talk to Richard, because he, Erlich, knew everything there was to know about their go-to-market strategy and he, Erlich, was not in fact, the dumbest man in Tech (fucking _Code/Rag_ ).

“What about our head of business development, Jared Dunn?” Erlich said finally. “He can bore the fuck out of you with ARPU projections and all that shit.”

The Mossberg wannabee deigned to meet with Jared.

“Great,” Erlich said, “I’ll just call him now.” He smiled and turned away, tapping rapidly on his phone. Fuck, voice mail.

“Sorry, I’m having signal problems,” Erlich lied. “Have another coconut water, I’ll just step into the hallway.”

He started texting as he closed the door. First, Jared: “Need you ASAP to take Richard’s place in meeting.” Then, he opened a Hooli chat with Dinesh and Guilfoyle: 

> E: I need Jared stat seen him today??
> 
> _D: Nope._
> 
> _G: Not since yesterday_
> 
> E: One of you needs to go find him and bring him to the suite now
> 
> _D: Leave the booth?_
> 
> E: Yes leave the fucking booth
> 
> _D: I think Guilfoyle should leave the booth._
> 
> _G: I think Dinesh should use his ancient Indian hunting skills to find Jared_
> 
> _D: Fuck you. First, I’m Pakistani. Second, even if I were Indian, I’m not that kind of …_
> 
> E: HES A 10-FOOT WHITE GUY GET OFF YOUR ASS AND GO FIND HIM
> 
> _D: Right. Find a random white guy on the floor of the biggest tradeshow of the year. No problem._
> 
> E: Now is not the time for sarcasm Dinesh
> 
> _D: I do not understand your …_

Erlich closed the Hooli app. Where the fuck was Jared, anyway? A brief image of Jared in bed with a half dozen showgirls flashed through his head. Unlikely, but you never knew.

His phone pinged. He pumped his fist up and down. Yes! Jared was on his way. Erlich breathed a sigh of relief and read Jared’s text again. Christ, who punctuates texts?

Erlich poked his head back in the suite. “Won’t be more than a minute. Did I mention the coconut water? It has five essential electrolytes or some shit like that. Zuckerberg orders it by the case.”

He glanced in the other direction of the suite and hoped Richard wasn’t giving away the secret to middle out to the Oracle dudes he was briefing. Erlich had put two of the newbies in there with him and given them firm instructions to throw themselves in front of the whiteboard if Richard even mentioned the stack.

Ten minutes went by, then another ten. The hack from the Journal smirked as he walked out the door past Erlich. “Call me when you get a business plan.”

Half an hour later, Jared rushed down the hallway, all apologies and puppy dog eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Erlich, I just got completely turned around,” Jared said. “You’d think I’d do better at this by now.” He gave a half laugh and shrunk into his shoulders. “It’s just the floor gets bigger every year, and after you called I turned left at Sony and then right at Docker, and then what I thought was the line for the elevator turned out to be the line to try the Rift.”

Erlich’s phone buzzed again.

> _D: Dude, we have looked everywhere. We are missing one tall white guy._
> 
> _G: Its not just Dineshs incompetence this time. We really can’t find him_

“Oh gosh, is that the guys?” Jared said. “I’m really sorry to have caused so much trouble, maybe I should go back down and man the booth for awhile?”

Erlich reached out and grabbed Jared by the shoulder with one hand while continuing to text the guys with the other. “Absolutely not. I need you to stay where I can find you.”

Jared beamed.

> _G: Can’t we just put a chip in him? You know, bell the bizdev guy or whatever._

Hmmm, Erlich thought.

“Absolutely not,” Richard said, a week later. “People already think we’re Skynet, we don’t need to make it worse by chipping our staff.”

“It’s not a chip,” Erlich protested, holding up what he thought was a very stylish silver chain with a tag on one end. “It’s more like a collar.”

Richard rolled his eyes across the kitchen table at him.

“You watch,” Erlich continued, undeterred. “I bet he’ll love us being able to find him whenever we want to.”

“Much as I hate to say these words,” Dinesh said, “Erlich is right. Jared definitely likes being needed. Hey, what about …

Guilfoyle slapped Dinesh’s hand away from where it was pointing at something at his screen.

“Fuck off,” Guilfoyle said. “Though, and I _really_ hate to say these words, you’re both right. Jared is basically a large dog with an MBA. He always comes when called.”

“Sorry, did someone say my name?” Jared poked his head into the kitchen.

Richard sighed. “Yes, we were just talking about how to avoid you getting lost again.”

Jared looked confused but then his attention was caught by the silver tag Erlich was still holding up. “Oh, is that one of those Tile things? Like for your keys?”

Erlich cleared his throat. “Uh, basically, yeah. But this one’s for you. Well, for us. So when we need you at DevWeek we can find you.”

“Only if you feel comfortable with it,” Richard said, waving his hands around.

Jared put his hand on his chest and blinked down at them. “So, this like, lets you guys know where I am at all times? That’s, just, I mean, guys, that’s just wonderful.”

Erlich felt a little tingle in his chest at the look in Jared’s eyes. Probably gas. He coughed.

“Right, well, here it is. If you don’t like the chain, put it with your keys or whatever.”

Jared clutched the silver tag. “Thank you guys so much. This means the world to me.”

Erlich cleared his throat again. “OK, so back to DevWeek. My talk about running an awesome incubator and changing the world is on Tuesday at 2pm, and I expect you all to fucking be there.”

They fucking were not there. Still, Erlich thought, any talk where you made someone cry was a success, so fuck those guys. Though, he’d expected Jared to have at least texted and yep, there it was on his phone. Apologies and explanations that he’d meet him at their next meeting, at 6pm.

Erlich opened the tracking app. He’d taken to looking up where Jared was more and more often lately. Jared was still Jared, of course, so mostly he was just in his room, or the kitchen, or sometimes at the grocery store. But Erlich still liked looking at the little green dot on his phone and knowing he could track Jared down if he had to.

Right now, however, Jared didn’t seem to be in the Embarcadero Center at all. Or, wait, no, he was back at the hotel. Erlich frowned. Back at the hotel, but not in the Pied Piper suite. Hmm… maybe he’d go wait in the lobby for him and they could go to the meeting together.

Erlich was on his third drink and had checked Jared’s location about 50 more times before the man himself made an appearance in the Hyatt lobby. A blonde guy was walking with Jared, one hand on Jared’s back steering him toward Erlich.

“Erlich!” Jared sounded very pleased with himself, Erlich thought. “You remember Michael from Amazon, right?”

Erlich did. He hadn’t liked the overconfident douchebag then, either. He shook hands and took another look at Jared, who was, Christ, was he blushing? Goddammit.

He waited until the Amazon douchebag left and then turned to Jared. “Please tell me you aren’t actually sucking guys off for Pied Piper.”

Jared blushed even harder. “No! Of course not.” He waved his hands around. “Well, not exactly.”

“What the fuck?”

Jared looked down and tugged on his sleeve. “I ran into Michael on the way to that Chef seminar, and then he said he needed my help, and uh.” He paused and smiled shyly. “I just really like being needed?”

Erlich’s mouth went dry. “Right, OK. Uh, let’s go.”

It wasn’t the first meeting Erlich spent with a hard-on, but it was the first time he spent it thinking about what else Jared might do to help out a guy with needs. This was really getting out of hand.

“Of course it’s getting out of hand,” said Guilfoyle, later. “We’re talking about Jared. You can’t put a leash on a dog and then just ignore it.”

“I continue to be really disturbed by the dog analogy,” Dinesh said. “Also, I thought it was a chip.”

“It’s just a small tag,” Erlich said, defensively. “So I can find him when I need – when I _want_ to.”

Guilfoyle smirked.

“You’ll see,” Erlich said. “It will be very useful at SXSW.”

And it would have been, if only journalists hadn’t stopped returning his calls back in mid-February. Instead of needing to find Jared to tag-team some _Business Insider_ hack, Erlich was stuck at the Austin Convention Center trying to avoid decapitation by marketing drones. He couldn’t even poke at Richard for fun, since the fucker had stayed behind this time.

Bored, he started to make his way through the hospitality suites. Microsoft always had the best booze but Google had the biggest shrimp. Jared found him two days later, backed into a corner by an Azure pitchman.

“Thanks, but we have all the capacity we want,” Jared said gently to the salesman. “But I was talking to a VP from Netflix just now, and they said they were reevaluating … OK, bye then.”

Erlich tried not to look too impressed. Jared’s smirk suggested he failed.

“Why are you here, Jared?” he asked. “I haven’t texted you once since we got here.”

“I know,” Jared said. Erlich stared, was that _sadness_ on Jared’s face?

Jared pulled out the chain from under his shirt and held up the silver tag on it. “In fact, I almost feel like I don’t really need to be wearing this any longer.”

Erlich gulped some air as Jared stepped closer. “I thought you liked being needed.”

Jared took the chain off his neck. “Oh, I do.” He put the chain over Erlich’s neck. “I just think you need to be needed more than me right now.”

Erlich opened his mouth, but said nothing, disoriented by the sensation of Jared wrapping his hand around the back of Erlich's neck and steering him toward the door.

They stopped in front of the elevator. “Here, let me," Jared said. He stepped even closer, bending his head under Erlich’s so that he could tuck the chain under Erlich’s turtleneck. He took a step back to appraise his work. Satisfied, Jared nodded and patted Erlich’s neck.

“Now I can find _you_ when I need you,” Jared said, looking very pleased.

Dazed, Erlich nodded. He raised no objections when Jared took him by the wrist and into the elevator.

Jared traced the outline of the silver tag underneath Erlich’s shirt, before dropping his hand and punching the button for their floor.

“I actually have quite a few needs of my own, you know,” Jared said.


End file.
